Past Blazers in the Playoffs - a quickie analysis

Astute observers of the NBA playoffs may have noticed that there seem to be a lot of former Trailblazers in them. Did every active former Blazer make it to the second season? No, but it's close. Pinwheel has manually compiled a list of active former Trailblazers and noted which made and did not make the playoffs. As this was done manually, there may be one or two missing, so leave a comment if you think of one.

Didn't make the playoffs:

(7 players) Alvin Williams, Rick Brunson, Dan Dickau, Matt Carroll, Richie Frahm, Stacey Augmon, Qyntel Woods

Made the playoffs:

(19 players) Damon Stoudamire, Nick Van Excel, Eddie Gill, Jeff McInnis, Antonio Daniels, Bonzi Wells, Jim Jackson, Derek Anderson, Aaron McKie, Ruben Patterson, Sergei Monia, Shareef Abdur-Rahim, Rasheed Wallace, Jermaine O'Neal, Scott Padgett, Cliff Robinson, Kelvin Cato, Dale Davis, Brian Grant

There are 16 teams in the playoffs, out of 29 non-Blazer teams. From that proportion alone (16/29ths), if there was a random distribution we would expect to see 14.34 former blazers out of the 26 reach in the postseason. A quick CHI-squared test (statisticians correct me if that is inappropriate or incorrect) gives us a value of 1.82 and a p-value of less than or equal to 0.20, but greater than 0.10 (I believe that's a two tailed P-value, but was too lazy to pursue it further). That isn't statistically significant by most standards, but it is suggestive.

What that means is we pick at random, there is less than a 10% chance of getting 19 or more out of 26 randomly selected non-blazer players in the playoffs. It seems there is are a disproportionate number of former pinwheel wearers in the postseason.

Why is that? The skips scap scalleywags and haters in the forum seem to believe that it simply means the present blazer management is incompetent and has given away all our great players that went on to lead their teams to the postseason. Is this true, or does some other factor account for the variance from expected?

When looking at the list realistically, it doesn't appear that many of them have actually made a difference as to whether their team actually made the playoffs. In fact, I can only think of two that if you took them off their bubble teams (forgetting for a second that the team would have gone on to sign someone else) it would have cost them a playoff berth: Jermaine O'Neal and Bonzi Wells.

It seems as though most of those former blazers that are now on playoff squads actively selected winning teams to resign with. Damon, NVE, McInnis, Daniels, Jackson, McKie, SAR, Rasheed, Cliffy, DD, and Grant all could have played for any number of teams, but they picked to go to good ones, many for less money than they could have gotten elsewhere.

Rather than their making the playoffs because the Blazers gave talent away for nothing, I think what we are witnessing here is the fact that older playoff tested veterans get to choose which teams they go to, and they choose winners, which accounts for the distribution we see this year.